SnapVolumes comes out of stealth with $2.3M in funding

SnapVolumes attempts to simplify the process of companies moving to the cloud

SnapVolumes, a new company that delivers an application management platform for cloud environments, has emerged from stealth mode with an angel investment of $2.3 million, it was announced Wednesday.

The company says that the funding came from “prominent industry executives,” including TiE Angels of Silicon Valley; Kumar Malavalli, the founder and former CTO of Brocade; Sanjog Gad, Senior Vice President of Technology at SAP Labs; and Rob Thomas, the CEO of Infoblox. Executives from Symantec, EMC, Citrix, and TIBCO also participated in the round.

Until this point, SnapVolumes had been self-funded. In an interview with VatorNews, SpanVolumes CEO Raj Parekh explained that the company decided to take money now in order to grow the team and to get key people involved in the company.

“We couldn’t hire them by giving them money, I could only get their attention by taking their money!” Parekh said.

The company says that it has attracted top engineering talent from VMware, Citrix, EMC, Symantec, Microsoft and Trend Micro.

What does SnapVolumes do?

SnapVolumes supports servers, desktops and applications on the cloud. It leverages the virtual infrastructure in order to make the transition cheaper and quicker for its customers.

Parekh says that his company is filling a “gaping hole” in the industry by replacing traditional tools, which managed applications in the world of physical servers. Servers have been static for years and are not equipped for virtual environments, he said. By not updating their servers, managers were seeing growing expenses in terms of application deployment, support, management, storage and infrastructure.

To combat this problem, SnapVolumes says that it has developed an new approach to enterprise application management, which takes full advantage of virtualization and modern storage technologies.

SnapVolumes is faster than its competitors because it only uses a single copy of an application, rather than hundreds of thousands of copies, Parekh says. What this means is that the single copy can be updated and debugged at a much faster rate than it would be otherwise, and that it also requires less storage and less bandwidth. This means that SnapVolumes can optimize thousands of servers "at lightening speed."

As many as 50% of enterprise servers have not been virtualized, Parekh said, meaning that there is a big opportunity out there for companies like SpanVolumes to come in and “eliminate the complexity of the process.”

According to Shaun Coleman, co-founder and vice president of products and marketing at SnapVolumes, the typical customer for company will be people and companies that are having trouble moving to the cloud or expanding their virtualization efforts.

The people behind SnapVolumes

While Parekh acknowledges that there are other, small companies providing a similar service as SnapVolumes, he says that it is the experience that he, and the other members of SnapVolumes have in infrastructure and securities.

Parekh co-founded Virident Systems in 2006, where he served as CEO and chairman. He was also CTO and vice president of engineering of all system products at Sun Microsystems, he also also co-founded Redwood Ventures.

Chief technology officer and co-founder Matthew Conover was formerly technical director for Symantec Research Labs and prior to that he held various research and engineering roles at Network Associates and BindView.

Coleman was formerly director of product management for Citrix XenDesktop, and he also founded the security startup company Reconnex, which was acquired in 2008 by McAfee.

Matthieu Suiche, SnapVolume’s chief scientist and co-founder, was one of the youngest Microsoft MVPs. He also worked as a researcher at the Netherlands Forensic Institute as part of the Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice.

Is it that combined experience that Parekh says sets the company apart from its competitors.

Los Altos, California-based SnapVolumes was founded in 2011, and its product has been in beta testing for the last three to four months. There is no timetable for when it will debut, and Parekh says that there is no set timetable for when it will be debut. The product currently has 12 customers who are testing it.